Necie

P.S. I am running to the post office with this. Caro and Teensy are going to write their letters after they calm down some. They have been sitting on your back porch with your brother, Pete, smoking cigarettes in the freezing cold and crying. Caro wants to go back and let your mother have it, whether she's sick or not. Oh, Honey, we love you so much.

Sidda felt like she'd stepped into another world. Carrying the letters with her to the sofa, she sat down, taking great pains to unfold each page with care. She read on.

January 21, 1943 Stinky- Sis, I'm sorry. I woulda just about rather driven into a nest of Japs than drive you to the station this morning.

You make them treat you good up there, you hear. Stick em with my pocketknife if they give you any trouble.

Love from your brother,

Pete

P.S. Caro told Mother if the sisters of Saint Goddamn Augustine mess around with you, they'll have the Sisters of Saint Ya-Ya to deal with. Mother just ran back to bed and didn't say a word.

Finally, Sidda opened a Western Union envelope to find the following telegram: JANUARY 22 1943.

MISS VIVI ABBOTT-SAINT AUGUSTINE'S ACADEMY SPRING HILL ALABAMA-CHER-WE LOVE YOU-CALL IF YOU NEED ANYTHING AT ALL-QUE LE BON DIEU VOUS BENIT REAL GOOD-GENEVIEVE ST. CLAIR WHITMAN.

Sidda set the first packet of letters down and stood up to stretch. Hueylene sat staring out the glass doors, her gaze trained on a pair of noisy Northwest crows that were fighting over some imagined slight. Turning back to the letters, Sidda picked up a larger stack of envelopes that was bound by a piece of faded blue ribbon.

April 22,1943 Dear Vivi, We haven't heard from you in ten days. Are you all right? I have written you four letters. Haven't you gotten them? Pal, we are worried.

Damn your parents for doing this. Your mother should be shot.

Make contact, Queen Dancing Creek.

XXX.

We love you.

Caro

April 24, 1943 Vivi Cher, I think maybe my last two letters didn't reach you because I refused to put "Joan" on the envelope. But this time I did, even though I hate to. But I want to make sure that you get this. Baby doll, I had a scary dream about you last night and I woke up crying. I told Maman about it, and she said to try and call you up. So we tried to call you first thing this morning and the nun wouldn't put us through. She said students were only allowed calls from their family, and then only on Sundays. What is this place that they won't let you talk to the people who love you? Maman got on the phone and tried to talk some sense into that nun, but she wouldn't listen. Maman is worried. You know, she went to the nuns too when she was a girl, but it was never like this. She says you must have some bad ones up there. Jack says your letters still sound cheery, but I know that's just because you're putting on a good face for him. We think you're the one that needs cheering up, Bebe.

Maman wants to know how she can help. Should she try to talk to your parents? Please let us know.

Mais oui, Vivi, we miss you so much you can't imagine. There has been a big hole cut out of us. Our whole communaute des soeurs is suffering. And it's not just the Ya-Yas who feel this way. Our whole class is not the same without you. School spirit has gone straight down the toilet. Even Anne Snobby-Butt McWaters and her crowd ask about you all the time.

I don't know who I miss more, you or my brother off in uniform. I can tell you this, with the two of you gone and this war raging all over my head, I am one blue girl. Write back right away.

XXXOOO.

Teensy

P.S. Did you receive the package with the Silver Screens? I'm so so sorry I haven't been able to get my hands on more hooch to send. I'll keep trying.

Sidda frowned as she pictured the young Vivi wrenched from her tender sisterhood and deposited like damaged freight at a convent school. As she carefully folded the letters back into their envelopes, she longed to fold the sixteen-year-old Vivi into her arms and comfort her. She longed to hold her mother, full-bloom flower ripped by the roots and thrown onto unfriendly soil. She longed to hold her mother and call her by her true name.

If Caro, Teensy, and Necie were this shook up by Vivi's departure, what must Vivi herself have been feeling? Sidda wondered. What were her mother's letters like? If only she could hear her mother's side of the story. Sidda stood up from her place at the table in the big room where she had been reading.

Her neck was tense, and she rubbed it and shook her shoulders. All life, all history happens in the body. I am learning about the woman who carried me inside of hers.

Sidda needed to move. She snapped the leash onto Hueylene and headed out for a walk along the lake, then into the forest, where the midmorning sunlight filtered down through the thick canopy.

With each step Sidda took, she thought of her mother. What had happened? Why was Vivi shipped off in the first place? What could she possibly have done that would have merited this punishment? She held deep reservoirs of anger toward her mother, not just because of her latest withdrawal of love, but for earlier, older hurts. Yet, as she walked, Sidda experienced her anger dissolve into grief and anger for her mother. Then, just as soon, the emotion switched back into anger toward Vivi.

She concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other. She thought about her mother's body and about her own body, and how they were so much alike. She thought about her legs as they strode forward. She thought about how her legs connected to her trunk. She thought that she was not a person with a body; she was her body, a body that had spent nine months inside Vivi's body. And as she walked, feeling the ground beneath her feet, and hearing the happy breathing of her dog alongside her, Sidda wondered about the subliminal knowledge that passes between a mother and a daughter. The preverbal knowledge, the stories told without words, flowing like blood, like rich oxygen, into the placenta of the baby girl as she grows in dark containment. Sidda wondered if, forty years later, she was not still receiving information from her mother through some psychic cord that linked them, thousands of miles, and countless misunderstandings apart from each other.

It was a cool, rainy day, with mist rising among the towering hulks of evergreen trees. As she stepped forward, her eye caught an intricate, lacy dead hemlock branch that hung in front of her. Each tip on every one of its tiny, feathery branches ended in a droplet of water, as if set with diamonds, like the delicate fabric of a party dress suspended in air. The exposed roots of a tree that ran across the trail, purple-black in their wetness, looked like the raised veins on an old woman's hands. Or like the tributaries and meanderings of the Garnet River as seen from a crop duster high above the delta farms. As she walked over Mother Earth, Sidda prayed: Stretch me wide so that the divine secrets that lay inside my mother, inside myself, inside the earth itself will find room enough in me to bear fruit.

Buggy had woken Vivi in the morning when it was still dark. "Viviane Joan," she said, flicking on the overhead light, "wake up. Wake up this instant."

The light hurt Vivi's eyes, and the sound of her mother's hard voice made her stomach tighten. She hugged her pillow and tried to hold on to sleep. She had been dreaming about dancing with Jack in Marksville. It was green summer and she was wearing a white dress. She could feel his palm against the small of her back and smell his breath as their cheeks touched.

"Viviane Joan," Buggy said, flinging Vivi's full name out like an accusation. "Get up and get dressed." Buggy bent down to pick up some of Vivi's clothes from the floor. "Your father has decided you need to take the early train."

"What?" Vivi asked, bolting up in bed, shocked.

This can't be, she thought.

"But, Mother," she said, "everything is planned for the afternoon train. That's when everybody's seeing me off. I'm supposed to take the 2:56. We have it all planned."

"You heard me," Buggy said, sighing as she reached under the bed and pulled out one of Vivi's saddle shoes.

"Father decided this?" Vivi asked. She could hardly breathe. How could her father have betrayed her like this?

"Yes," Buggy said, without looking at Vivi. "Get up. I need to strip your bed."

Vivi got out of bed and stood beside it, her feet cold against the floor, her body longing for the warm covers. There was something different about Buggy this morning, something in her voice, an excitement. Buggy was already dressed in her clothes for Mass, and the chapel veil was on her head.

Buggy flung back the covers, then the sheets. Efficient as a hospital nurse, she whipped the pillows out of their cases, and peeled back the cotton mattress pad.

With each gesture, Buggy signaled the overwhelming rage she felt toward her daughter. Silently, and with every flick of the linens, Buggy rejected Vivi's firm, flowering adolescent body, which had, until moments before, warmed the bed.

Although no words were spoken, Vivi felt all this as she stood watching her mother. Instinctively, she crossed her hands over her breasts, as though she needed an armor stronger than her flannel nightgown to safeguard herself from Buggy.

"When did Father decide this?" Vivi asked. "He didn't say anything about it to me last night."

"Your father does not have to tell you everything," Buggy said. "You are not his wife. He told me just before he went to bed. He wants you on the 5:03 this morning."

Buggy gathered the pillows underneath her arms, raising her chin slightly, as though she were waiting to see how her daughter would take this. At first Vivi said nothing. Mother and daughter stood glaring at each other, muscles tensed for action in a battle neither understood.

For a fleeting moment, it occurred to Vivi that her mother might be lying. But the thought was so horrible she could not make an accusation.

Instead, she said, "I want to take that little pillow with me, please," and pointed to a small goose-down pillow that Delia had made with Ginger's help. Delia had given it to Vivi, along with a silk pillowcase, before the war made such luxuries as silk verboten.

"You don't need this," Buggy said, squeezing the pillow tightly to her chest. "They'll have pillows at Saint Augustine's."

"I want that pillow," Vivi said. "It was a gift from Delia."

As Vivi said this, she would have given anything if her grandmother had been in the room at that moment. She had written Delia as soon as Buggy had started up about Saint Augustine's, but Delia was visiting with Miss Lee Beaufort at her ranch in Texas, and she had not responded. Vivi imagined that if Delia had only been there she would have protected her. But Delia was never there. Vivi wanted to turn on her mother, slap her, kick her, denounce her for her cruelty and unfairness.

"Is Father downstairs?" Vivi asked.

"No, he is not," Buggy answered. "Your father is still sleeping. He is exhausted, Viviane Joan. You have worn him out."

Taylor Abbott had spoken very little since the night of Vivi's birthday. When Buggy first brought up the idea of Saint Augustine's, he had tried only once to veto the idea.

"We can clip Vivi's wings just as well here at home as they can in Alabama," Vivi's father had said. "Girls' schools are strange breeding grounds."

Buggy refused to be silenced. She didn't back down to him as she usually did. Taylor Abbott didn't so much agree to Saint Augustine's as finally turn around, walk into his study, and close the door on the subject.

Just the night before, Vivi had gone to her father in the living room, where he sat in his chair listening to the war news on the radio.

She waited until a radio advertisement came on before she spoke. "Father, may I interrupt you?"

Everyone in the Abbott household always had to ask permission before speaking to Taylor Abbott.

"Yes, Viviane, you may," he said, still half listening to the radio.

Vivi had meant to be controlled, present her case logically, in a way that would please her father the lawyer. Instead, she blurted it out, her voice quivering.

"Must I really go, Father? Do I have to? Must I get on that train tomorrow afternoon? Please, Father. You could stop this from happening. You know Mother has to do what you say."

He looked at her for a moment, and Vivi felt some hope.

"It's already arranged, Viviane," he said. "You are going to Saint Augustine's."

Immediately Vivi adjusted her body so that she stood more erect. She grabbed control of her voice.

I have to compose myself, she thought, or he will not listen. If only I could be poised, if only I can smile in that way he likes, if only I can speak in the unruffled tone he admires, then Father might see me. One true glimpse is all I need. One true glimpse and he will understand that he cannot ship me away.

But when she opened her mouth, the words tumbled out in a desperate gush.

"Father, please, please," she said, on the verge of tears. "I will do anything you want. Just please don't make me leave."

Taylor Abbott looked at his daughter as she stood in front of him, her blonde hair pulled back in a scarf, her pajama top slightly askew so that one freckled shoulder was partly revealed. Her lips quivered, her eyes brimmed with tears that had not yet spilled over. Her skin looked sallow, almost blue around the eyes; her sweet paleness now looked anemic to him, a gardenia bruised around the edges. He could not bear such raw emotion; it made him physically ill. It was what he hated about his wife, along with the sweat, the smell, the blood every month.

"Vivi," Taylor Abbott said, "never beg."

Then he reached to the radio and turned the volume up. Leaning back in his chair, he closed his eyes and resumed listening to the war news, as though his daughter were no longer in the room.

Vivi continued to stand there, studying the patterns of the living-room rug. She listened to all the news of the British and Indian troops in Burma. Finally, Taylor Abbott opened his eyes and trained them on his daughter.

In a confident voice, he said, "You'll do fine, Viviane. I don't worry about you. Don't have to. You take after the Abbotts."

Then he stood up, turned off the radio, and started up the stairs. All Vivi could see was his back. All she could see was a pair of suspenders and a white shirt.

"Hurry up and get dressed," Buggy said as she stood at Vivi's bedroom door. "You have just enough time to make the train. Pete is taking you to the station."

"What about Father?" Vivi asked. "Isn't he coming? I want to tell him goodbye."

"Your father asked not to be awakened, Viviane Joan. Please. Do not cause any more trouble than you already have."

"But I won't be able to see the Ya-Yas, Mother. I can't leave without telling them goodbye. We had our goodbye all planned."

"The four of you have been saying goodbye for a week now."

"The Ya-Yas are my best friends, Mother. I have to see them."

Suddenly, as though she could not contain her rage any longer, Buggy took the pillows and bedding she'd just stripped from the bed and flung them at Vivi.

"Stop it!" Buggy said, vehement, resentful. "I won't hear one more word about the all-precious Ya-Yas! Are they all you think about?!"

"Mama," Vivi said, dropping the more formal way she usually addressed her mother. "Don't do this, please. They're my best friends. I can't just leave them like this!"